I Blog With My Face

I have been playing a lot of League of Legends lately. Alliteration aside, I think it’s a solid game that’s let me reconnect with some friends back at home while I’m on winter break here in Korea. I won’t get to play quite as much with them once school starts, but I’ve deeply enjoyed my time so far. Except for one, small, tiny problem.

Griefers.

They’re becoming a more ubiquitous sort of problem in video game culture in general, and LoL and other DOTA clones are well known for the amount of trolling that goes on in the game. “Fucking retards”, “My team has downs”, “Oh God, it would be better if you just went AFK.” Actually, I got told that in a game I played just tonight. “Fizz, ur useless. just afk.” And I’ll admit, it hurt. I mean, it always does. That’s the point, and also the problem. A certain amount of teasing and ribbing is in line with competition of any kind. There’s a natural, primal instinct to gloat, to roar in triumph. I think it’s part of our ancestry, actually. To be able to cry out, to shout that you had achieved something gave you recognition, gave you status. If you could do what you said you could do, then you wanted to be known for that. In competitions that’s primarily “Beat the other guy”, and we celebrate it even today when we ask sports stars and athletes what they think of their performance in the game today, or how they trained to be so God Damned Fast.

But in games online, this sort of gloating is tainted and transformed by the medium that the sport takes place in. Before there were online games, there were online forums. Chat rooms, BBSes, newsgroups, where people could come together under the veil of anonymity and discuss their opinions. But given that safety net, people began to let their darker sides out. The more vindictive, angry, violent, and frankly cruel sides. We gave a name to these shadows of the Internet, who delight in getting a rise out of people.

We called them trolls.

For a long time, the advice was “Don’t feed the trolls”, and it was relatively sound. If you ignore them, then you beat them. You don’t give them what you want. If you can just hold your head, and not submit to their taunts and jeers, their threats and insults, then you can continue on this great big thing we call the Web, undisturbed. Maybe a little bloody, but unbowed.

Video games didn’t have this much of a problem in the early days, because they were often against a computer opponent. But games, particularly online games, require a certain amount of commitment to your teammates. Cordial behavior, teamwork, respect, and the same goal in mind. As the games we designed grew more and more social, then the inherent problem of anonymous assholes who get their jollies off by making other people feel bad bled into this new frontier. Suddenly, we had problems trusting our own teammates. We thought that we could at least count them on being civil, but “gg noobs” and “just uninstall the game fagtard” became part of our vocabulary.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s any one solution that can ever beat out trolling. Which is not to say that we should give up, and just wash our hands of these games. It simply means that we must be ready to accept that there will be a period of time when our experience with it will be less than ideal. Even frustrating. But there are ways of dealing with trolls that are effective.

1. Don’t play with them on your team.

This is perhaps the ideal, and may be impossible in some cases, but is relatively manageable in team games. Do your best to find a community that you feel is worth your time and be a part of it. This may mean you play with your friends only, or it might also mean that you stumble upon a subreddit or a newsgroup concerning your game, and find that the people there are exceptionally friendly or helpful.

Once you’re there, play with them rather than (at least in League of Legends’ case) solo-queue. This has a couple of advantages of not only minimizing your contact with trolls, but also probably improving your game, depending on the size of the community. You learn how to perform your role better, and wind up enjoying the game more.

2. Combat trolling.

“Don’t feed the trolls” is not the same thing as combating trolling. In the former, you’re frustrated, probably angry, and just break. You start swearing, yelling, maybe you go AFK in your game. The troll wins. Even in the defeat of your team, he still gets the satisfaction of knowing that he beat you, and that’s all he wants.

But in the later, which is a bit more situation dependent, you can at least stem the tide. If the troll is on their team, you can report him through any means you have available to your game. In League of Legends, this takes the form of the Tribunal, a peer-reviewed system where other players make determinations on how the game played out based on final score and chat logs, and then Riot employees mete out punishments. I think it’s a pretty good system, and if the statistics gathered by Riot are to be believed, then it’s marginally effective as well.

If the troll is on your team, giving shit to the other players, ask him to stop. You might suffer a bit of your own hazing, but you let your other teammates know that that shit isn’t acceptable, and you fight it, just a tiny bit. It does work better if your teammates are people you know, since they might actually listen to you in that case, but we can’t all work with the ideal.

3. The ignore button.

This isn’t as effective a way to deal with trolls as I would like, but it’s pretty ubiquitous, and follows the internet’s oldest rule about trolls. Most games have some sort of function where you can ignore a certain user. This can be taken advantage of within the game to let you ignore them, and thereby, never deal with them again.
This is my least favorite way of dealing with trolls because it doesn’t actually solve the problem of their behavior in the first place, but there’s only so much to be done about that, largely involving actual remorse on the part of the troll. Really, it feels like you’re just pawning the problem off on other people, but it is an effective strategy, as about 25 years of being online has shown us.

I think as gamers, we have to adapt to the idea that there are people in our games who, just for the lulz, want us to be miserable. The first defense against such behavior is knowing it exists, and then dealing with the emotions generated by that behavior in a responsible way. If you’re just going to ragequit because some guy calls you a “fagtard n00b”, then you’ve lost, and they’ve won, and you wasted your time.

But if you can get the better of them, even when they are kicking you while you’re down, then you can appreciate the high points of your games much more than if you’re being so angry that you can’t see straight. So please, don’t feed the trolls.

Tabor Uncategorized behavior, gaming, lol, trolls, Wheaton's Law

Sorry for the infrequent updates. I’m in Korea.

No really. In South Korea.

I don’t have my computer ready quite yet, and I never really posted a lot to begin with, so if you watch this space, expect slow updates, and probably not concerning gaming as much.

Thanks!

Tabor Uncategorized

Before we had language, we had stories. People have always wanted to communicate, to share experiences, and to entertain. “Remember that mammoth Ogg killed that one time?” Oh Ogg, you rascal. You legend. We still tell stories of older times, and they still resonate. The Iliad and Odyssey, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Epic of Sundiata, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Popol Vuh. The stories of ancient Goddesses and kings, heroes and villains, trials to overcome, lessons to be learned. Storytelling is one of the things that makes us human, and it has adapted as we have. With new ways to communicate, we’ve come up with new ideas of how stories should be told. Radio dramas and eventually movies were made possible by advances in technology. Though we’ve always had plays, the ability to reach a very large audience was limited by the dimensions of the theatre the play was staged in. With the advent of radio and motion pictures, the restraints of the physical were loosened.

The march of progress continues, and with it, we consider the role of video games as narrative devices. Though board games have had roots in storytelling, video games offer a unique way to explore stories of people, places, and events. Though all games require the player to be aware that they are playing, some video games have been able to bend or twist this perception. Extra Credits makes a compelling case for this in Missile Command, in that the player should put themselves in the role of someone defending six cities close enough to drive to. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of lives are in your hands and you have to save them from an unknown assailant who just keeps raining missiles on those six targets. It’s easier to save them of course if you let some of them die, as there are fewer targets, but then again, you’ve just let your fellow countrymen be obliterated. It may be easier to save the rest, but only for a time, as Missile Command doesn’t end until all six cities are gone. It ends only when everyone dies.

The story-within-a-story convention has also seen a degree of success in gaming. Final Fantasy Tactics, possibly my favorite game ever, asks you to recount the tale of a brutal war for a country. You play Ramza, a character lost to history, and though the game’s mechanics are clearly a JRPG, the story is not just of Ramza’s successes and failures, but is seen through the lens of time. The narrator is a historian from four hundred years in the future, telling us the deeds of a man who was purged from the annals of the world. No. Really. FFT takes one of the standard Final Fantasy narratives, a globe-changing war, and talks not only about it, but the tendency of humans to bury the things we don’t agree with. Ramza lost, or else he’d be recorded as a hero, but we are introduced to him as a man who is outside of the scope of history, someone forgotten because he was inconvenient to the winner’s designs. Their plans. Their story. It’s a brilliant piece of narrative, and one perhaps only possible in a video game. How else would get to experience the life of someone who was erased from history?

The first person perspective in video games does similarly interesting things to narrative. We are forced by perception to be in the story ourselves. Nothing else gets us quite as close to the action of a story. Even with first person narration, we don’t get the experience of being in the story. “I walked to the bank, took out some money, flirted with the teller, and then got in my car to go home. Along the way, I saw a dog chasing a cat, and some kids riding bikes.” This is a somewhat different experience than playing a game in which your all your perspective is is everything on the screen. Here, I’d like to introduce perhaps the most well told story of the past five years, Portal (and Portal 2). Apologies to Mr. Patrick Rothfuss. Seriously, go read his books.

The first person style of Portal 2 is exceptionally useful in telling a compelling story. These things don’t just happen to Chell, but to you, the player. GLaDOS isn’t giving speeches to some woman in a weird laboratory, but to people who are sitting at their computers, figuring out things for science. However, if all that Portal had to bring to the table was a first person perspective, it wouldn’t be doing the medium a whole bunch of favors. They’ve been done before. Even first person non-shooters have had their time in the sun, as evidenced by the Myst series, and even The 7th Guest. No, what Portal does is take an interesting story and tell it well, with both monologuing from a great character as well as incorporating mechanics into the storytelling, particularly in Portal 2.

Without trying to spoil too much, Portal 2 takes one of the core aspects of a puzzle game and turns it into a great way to tell the backstory of the world which the characters live in. Necessarily, Portal 2 requires you to explore, to find out new ways of going places, and to think of new ways of doing things. In so exploring, you are forced to uncover the story of the Aperture Labs, how they got built, who built them, and why. It talks about loss and struggle while being a struggle itself. It is a challenge to make your way through the middle third of the game, as the layout of the labs undergoes a decided shift. As a result, you find out a lot about the character of the builder of the labs, as well as GLaDOS, your former archenemy turned reluctant ally.

The speech in the game is also legendarily funny. Well written, sharp, just a tad creepy, GLaDOS’ monologue is not only well phrased, but expertly delivered. Though more characters are introduced in Portal 2, each feels very natural to the world, as though they were lurking at the edges of Portal the entire time. Their own writing is just as sharp, their vocal characterizations just as endearing. Again, trying not to spoil anything.

Ultimately, what the experience comes down to is a well crafted piece of narrative excellence, one that can’t be achieved with just pictures or words, but interactivity. Portal 2, and in particular the end sequence, isn’t particularly groundbreaking in terms of video games, except to say that it is storytelling done oh-so-right. It takes the emotional qualities of a great novel and blends them with a dramatic, fantastic display characteristic of any Hollywood blockbuster. In the synthesis of script, sounds, and scenes, we get an amazing story that shows what video games are beginning to accomplish in terms of art.

We’re at the beginning of a movement. Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts extended the definition of the grants to include Arts In Media. For those of you still skeptical if video games can qualify as art, this should help settle that debate. A government agency empowered to give money on their behalf extended the definition of media to include:

All available media platforms such as the Internet, interactive and mobile technologies, digital games, arts content delivered via satellite, as well as on radio and television.

It’s up to us to make sure that the stories we tell are not just of King Arthur and Bruce Lee, but also of Chell and GLaDOS, of Ramza and Cloud, of Mario and Peach. These are our heroes, and our legends.

Let’s tell some stories.

Tabor Uncategorized

Role-playing games are an escape from reality. We play to forget the hardships of a day, and to enjoy the company of friends. We play because we would rather be these other people, at least for a few hours. But the few moments we can steal away from the dreary day-to-day are still at the whim of Real Life. Sometimes, we can no longer make the commitments that we made when we started gaming. Sometimes, we’re no longer having fun with these characters, or this party, or this DM. And sometimes, Real Life says “Enough.”

And we stop.

It’s lamentable. It’s tragic even. With bittersweet farewells in character and mixed feelings out, we try to reconfigure the game to deal with the absence of characters and players who we had previously counted on.

And that’s the rub. We did count on these people. We counted on the storyteller to keep telling stories, or the tank to keep getting all those big, bad monsters not to hit us. We counted on the healer to keep us alive. We counted on the rogue to gank bitches and take names, damn it! We counted on our friends, and we can’t any longer.

So how to move on? How to deal with the absence introduced? Well, that depends on a lot of things, but mostly it depends on whether the person who is leaving was a mere player on a stage, or if he was the storyteller.

If the storyteller’s gone, then nine times out ten it’s the end of the game. It’s a little different in a LARP, where players have a lot of investment in the games themselves, but if it’s a tabletop game, or if it’s a raid, that might very well be the death knell of it. You can kiss that game good bye, and those stories probably finish without ending. Maybe that’s the greatest tragedy; the game got started because the people around it wanted to tell a story, and they’ll never have that chance any more. The sour feelings and wishful thinking that the game could be resurrected someday almost pale in comparison to the story having never reached a “the end”.

It’s far more common, and far more muddy, if it’s a player who leaves. If one player leaves, usually the person in charge (the ST or raid lead) will try to fill that place in, try to get someone new to pick up the slack. This usually works, but doesn’t usually work well. New party dynamics have to be figured out, new relationships have to be established in an already established order. Can it work? Like real world relationships that have problems, it’s really only possible if everyone left tries to make it work. The new player has to do their best to fill the role expected of them, and the rest of the group has to try and accommodate the new. It’s more disastrous if one person’s leaving triggers an exodus, and suddenly, a noticeable percentage of the game just isn’t there anymore.

In either case, if the remaining people want to save it, they have to make the decision to try to save it. They have to be willing to put in the effort to do the heavy lifting, and to deal with the new that has taken the place of the old. It’s hard for the people who don’t make the decision to leave, but instead decide to try and rebuild, knowing they’ll not only be a little sadder, but that the game they’re now playing is not the game they agreed to play when the game began. All games change over time, but rarely do they change so radically.

On the other hand, the players might not want to save the game. They might just want to reform, with a new idea. Play a different game, raid with completely different characters. Moving on from what was to what will be, what could be. The possibility of having something new to take the player’s mind of the old is a very alluring concept. Since the old game failed, after all, you have all this free time to fill it up with a new game.

There is also the decision to just tough it out. Maybe you don’t need that person in the way you thought you did. Maybe you can get on, ignoring the limp, the phantom character sensation as it were. It doesn’t always apply, of course. You need a storyteller, and you need a couple of players, but you can sometimes make do with less. Maybe you had more than you needed to begin with, and it’s actually a blessing in disguise. Your games are faster now, streamlined without that extraneous part of the group.

But ultimately, the problem isn’t with the person who’s leaving. They’ve made their peace, and their decision, and carry on with their lives. They knew what they were doing, and when the finally put their foot down, there isn’t a lot that another people can do about it.

No, the problem is with who’s left.

Tabor Uncategorized gaming, leaving, social contract, staying, WoW

4.0.1 has been out for only a few weeks at this point, but its changes have been significant. While Deathwing’s sweep over the face of Azeroth will redesign the zones entirely, the pre-patch brings with it all the class changes both anticipated and feared about for the past four months since their initial announcement. At this point, I’m feeling the sense though that the changes are just a little short of the mark. They’re not meant for the game as it is now, but as it will become, and that seems to show through with the late game raiding I’ve done. Still, it’s good to get this out of the way now, and practice it for when we go into Cata proper. For now it’s a bit incomplete, but the changes are something to write home about. Or at least to you, dear readers.

The one-two punch to the game has been the wholesale revamp of the talent trees as well as the radical UI changes. There’s a lot of under-the-hood, mechanical grittiness that has been excised and shifted about as well, but the most prevalent changes are the ones that stare back at you as you’re looking them over.


The most pervasive, note-worthy changes are the dramatic reconfiguration of talents. Every talent tree has been cut down to 31 points, and all the talent trees are given a “signature” talent, one that defines them as a talent tree, and some trees have a passive ability. Enhancement Shamans for example get dual-wielding as a passive ability and Lava Lash as their signature ability. Additionally, at level 80, a Mastery ability is unlocked. This functions with a new stat, Mastery, to provide some sort of additional passive bonus that can get better. Symbosis is the Mastery ability of Restoration Druids, whose heals are more effective on people with heal-over-time spells on them, and the more Mastery they have, the more effective they are.

These two changes make talents more accessible while preserving their crunch, their mechanical depth. Every tree is stronger at the bottom end, at level 10 when you make your choice and get your abilities, but when you get to level 80, the usefulness of your Mastery has to be considered when raiding. Do you prioritize Mastery above crit, or haste, for example? Is it worth that much? Well, you can crunch the numbers and based on that, you can reforge.

Oh sorry. More mechanical crunch in with your synopsis of changes, my bad. Got them mixed in again. Reforging is a process where you can take one secondary stat (crit, haste, expertise) and change it for another (dodge rating, mastery, parry rating). The examples are more broad than that, but hopefully you get the picture. It allows (to a degree) to have a suboptimal piece, because you can reforge the part of it you don’t want into a more useful stat.


The other omnipresent change is the redesign of the UI to include two features:

The first feature is a built in display that activates when something procs, which is to say that when something suddenly becomes different because it is free or a situation arises where I can use it, shit lights up. I’ve seen this the most on my Warlock, when Empowered Imp triggers and I suddenly have a free Soulfire to fling around, but this also comes up on Tabs when he shifts into Tree of Life and things become changed because of it.

The second feature is a built in raid-frame, which I have found exceptionally helpful. It’s not as compact as a raid frame like Grid, for example, but it does what I want it to do: tell me about buffs I can dispell, show everyone’s health, and how much my heals are projected to do for them. It also shows me the hots I cast on them, but this is really only useful as Tabs.


There are smaller changes to each class, but I’m just going to go over the ones I have experience with:

Death Knight – The overhaul of the talents means that Blood is your one stop shop for tanking. Unholy and Frost now have nothing to do with it, and while I’m not quite as happy with the change (I thought talents in every tree was an important idea about the DK), Death Knights got the best end of the stick as far as 4.0.1. tanking goes, because their AOE tanking is still very much a part of them. Death and Decay’s cost got chopped down to just one Unholy rune, and Blood Boil is now even stronger as a tanking tool.

Druid – Swipe.SWIPE MOTHER FUCKERS. Pulverize is cool though. That’s more or less all I have to say about it. Also, I miss swipe. But cat damage is pretty high, which is cool. Also, I like Tree as Metamorphosis, so if any of you people have issue with that, I’m sorry. But really, that’s it. Swipe, you godless sons-of-bitches.

The important change to both of these classes that I as a tank have noticed is the “on next hit” mechanic, which was removed like a bad memory in Dollhouse. Both Rune Strike and Maul are no longer “whenever you next swing” but “right the fuck now”, or as Blizzard likes to call it “instant”. As such, it requires a little bit of reworking to get the patterns and timing right again, but it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up.


Warlock – Curses and Banes and Soulburns, oh my. But seriously, Curse of Agony and Doom were split off into their own nifty thing called a “bane”, which is just another way of saying moar dots, or just getting Agony and Doom on while you hit something with a curse of elements. Also, Soul Shards were transformed into things that empower spells with a spell called Soulburn. You really wanna cast Soul Fire right now? Well, chuck a Soul Shard at it. BAM. Instant Soul Fire. How nice.

Rogue – Lots of fun to level; Recuperate is bomb. That’s about it. I’m looking forward to playing my shammy too.


Overall, I think that the patch has been interesting, but it feels like we’ve got an incomplete game on our hands. Notably, we have few too talent points, and mastery has no depth. For the first point, things like Evangelism and Archangel were clearly designed to be paired with Shadow priests, as well as Perseverance for Feral Druids, but these talents aren’t available to those builds without five additional talent points. Secondarily, it’s hard to rate the true effectiveness of Mastery until we have more gear for it. Theorycrafting for the usefulness at 80 seems a mere thought experiment that people run through to have fun with some numbers, rather than have a meaningful affect on the raiding landscape.

I have enjoyed my time in Northrend. My raid team and I just killed Halion (man does he have bad breath) for the first time, so it was nice to experience the endgame for a patch, but now, I’m just looking forward to Deathwing’s arrival, to get my claws into something new.

Tabor Uncategorized

Sometime ago, Blizzard announced Real ID, a system where people could communicate with their friends in ways that were previously impossible. If you had permission (which is to say someone’s email address and the ability to get them to say yes) you could talk to them with Real ID regardless of faction, realm, or game. The first two only really matter for WoW, but they’re a pretty important part of why I like Real ID so much. Since its implementation, neither the fact that a good friend of mine plays Alliance and I play Horde nor that we play on different servers matters any more; I can talk to him all I like as long as one of his characters is on. In about two weeks from now, Starcraft II is releasing with Real ID functionality, and that’s where cross-game communication takes place. My buddies who are running for their lives from Banelings can tell me about it while I tell them about running for my life from the Lich King. Presumably, Diablo III will have this feature as well, and people will continue this trend by telling us about how they ran for their lives from demonic hordes. Though communication external to the game is certainly possible, communication within the game has the primary advantage of shared context: when I am talking to people with Real ID, I know that they are online gaming, and indeed, what game they are playing. Though presumably they are my friends already, this gives us (or reinforces) the common ground we share, and I think it can be said defines what Blizzard wanted to do with Real ID anyway: establish a community.

But community on the internet is a funny thing. Perhaps the most important of the components in my favorite Internet Formula is anonymity. People don’t want to be known online. It’s why we have screen names, avatars, user IDs. It’s why we don’t call each other Bob or Jill but Kagor and Ash’ra’ael. The importance of identity is diminished on the internet, where I can call myself anything I like, on any medium I choose: I can create email addresses, forum handles, avatar names. Who I am becomes less important than what I say.

As a result, people feel freer. Explicitly not safer since safety necessitates a diminished perception of threat, but people who use the internet feel no need to restrain themselves quite as much. They can say things that they’ve never told people, or wouldn’t say normally. They call people obscene things, and rant at length about secret loves. They have no need for pretense when everyone is acting by the same rules: when I say that my weekend was spent gearing up my paladin and priest for the changes coming in Cataclysm, you don’t have to stare at me. You know exactly what I mean.

When Blizzard announced, about a month ago, that they were going to enabled Real ID names for all of their forum posts, the response was overwhelming. Literally. That thread almost got to 50,000 posts, the vast majority of which decried the change. One of the most compelling I read plainly and simply stated the reasons that the poster (Faythe, of Sol Eternum on Icecrown) hated the idea.

I, the poster, am one or more of the following:

- a woman
- a minor
- a member of an ethnic minority
- a person of alternative sexuality
- a transgendered person
- a person with a unique/uncommon name
- a person who has been harassed/stalked
- a person in an information-sensitive profession
- a person who may be Google searched by co-workers/employers/potential employers
- a person who may be Google searched by mates/potential mates
- a person who is concerned about account security
- a person who is uninterested in online social networking
- a person who does not fit any of these categories but who is nonetheless concerned for him/herself or for the welfare of others

and I oppose RealID for one or more of these reasons:

- It is a threat to personal safety.
- It is a threat to personal security.
- It will not eliminate/significantly reduce trolling.
- It should be optional; choosing between risk and silence is not truly “optional”.
- Unified tags/handles provide the same effect with minimal risk.
- World of Warcraft is not Facebook.

If this decision persists, I will do one or more of the following:

- Refrain from posting on these forums.
- Seriously reconsider my subscription.
- Cancel my subscription. Have already attempted twice to cancel my account, but the page isn’t working. Will call and cancel.
- Prepare to cancel my subscription should RealID be made mandatory in-game.

Though there are many good sources of information and discussion on WoW apart from the game’s main forums, Blizzard has been the place for its own community moderators and game designers. It’s the place where Blizzard’s official policy is made public, and it has a lot of weight because of that. All of that weight means that when we get to nearly 50,000 posts about how this is a bad thing, we arrive at Blizzard’s reversal.

Rather than sticking with it, the policy was revoked. Posted about three weeks ago, Blizzard chose to listen to their supporters.

We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

Was it a smart move? Maybe. There’s certainly a couple of different arguments we could follow, about whether Blizzard should’ve stuck to their guns and gone through with it, because its their game and their servers and they’ll do the things they want to in their own way. There’s the other side of the coin that says that Facebook’s already gotten a lot of heat for privacy concerns and this, being the hot button topic of the web for the past few months (a long time on this here internet), needs to be addressed carefully to the consumer’s satisfaction.

I think the end result is a mixed bag. Blizzard has partnered with Facebook in regards to RealID, and though I’m loving the ability to talk to my WoW guildmates from SCII, I think the problem is that privacy and security are a big concern with both right now, and Blizzard has ominously used the words “for now” regarding a lot of the RealID development. The issues and stakes have been raised, and it’s up to the community that Blizzard has created to stand up for themselves. If something like this happens again, the people who are affected have to be vigilant, and cry out, 50,000 posts strong:

“No.”

Tabor Uncategorized

I’m at the Make-a-Strip panel right now, blogging on my phone. We’ll see how effective this is.

Tabor Uncategorized mobile blog, PAX

Normally, I am staunchly anti-pirate. Being of a ninja-like persuasion (one might say ninjesque), pirates have no place in my heart. They are sea rats and brigands, barely fit for those floating masses of jetsam they call “ships”. However, even pirates are afforded a port of safe harbor with me, sometimes.

Piracy for video games is a problem. I think we can all respect the idea that people want to be paid for services they provide and products they create, and the people who create video games are no different. They make something we enjoy, and there are a lot of people behind the project: artists, writers, musicians, voice actors, producers, directors… Modern gaming is a lot like a movie in that way. But movies and other “intellectual properties” are viciously guarded by certain entities, who take really drastic measures to protect them, and the video game industry is following suit.

Let’s take a look at Ubisoft’s latest attempt to get into the debate. Recently, Ubisoft introduced some of the most stringent anti-piracy policies ever implemented. In essence, Ubisoft requires your game to keep a constant connection to the internet so that the game can log on to their servers and authenticate your copy of Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2. This policy turns what are nominally single-player games into something else, since you can’t play them alone under all circumstances. If your internet connection goes out either because your hardware at home is crappy or your ISP is having a bad hair day, or Ubisoft’s own servers go down or are DDoS’d into oblivion, you’re out of luck.

The reaction to this policy has not been pretty. (The link on “pretty” is my favorite, by the way. If you only click on one link this entire article, that should be it.)

Though this only applies to the PC version of these games, it’s definitely a slap in the face to legitimate consumers who wanted to play AC2 on their home computer. X-Box and PS3 aficionados can still enjoy wacky medieval Italy just fine, but there are still gamers who prefer PCs to consoles. A friend of mine told me that she and her father eschewed home systems entirely: “What good is an X-Box that doesn’t run the games I want to play? My computer is more customizable and does things I need it to do, other than playing games.” Her stance is completely rational, and Ubisoft’s policy is not only infuriating to those people who feel like they are being punished for their preference of system, but it doesn’t even do what Ubisoft is trying to do.

Ultimately, Ubisoft’s aim is to stop pirates. They don’t want their product stolen. They want to have it paid for, which is reasonable. Their response is unreasonable, given the fact that pirates have in fact, cracked the game.

This is normal for pirates.

Everyone in the industry saw this coming. Really, everyone. Ubisoft especially must’ve seen this coming, because I don’t believe they can be this blind, this naive. Any gaming company that has been around this long cannot possibly be this stupid, and I chose to believe that what Ubisoft really is, at their core, is this desperate. They have thrown everything else at the wall, and none of that shit has stuck.

So while Ubisoft is becoming more like the RIAA, let’s consider people who are trying new things in combating piracy.

This is Jonathan Coulton. He’s a musician, and as such, people are interested in his goods: songs. Many people in fact are interested in his songs, particularly people who are good at computers, as he tends to sing about geeky things. As a result, he’s well aware that people are going to try and take his stuff without paying him. What does he say to that? Well, he’s kind of okay with it.

I don’t wish to misconstrue his position here. He would like to get paid for his work, since he has a child and a wife and wants to be able to contribute things like taxes to his community and so forth. What he does differently than big labels though is realize the truth: “The truth is, artists are already competing with free — your music can be obtained for free, I guarantee it. So it’s important to realize every music purchase represents a choice to spend money. I’ve always been clear that while I’m happy to let you download for free, I’d rather you actually gave me money. And a lot of people make that choice.”

He’s experimenting with something called a Creative Commons license to distribute his music, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Really, the trick to combating piracy seems to be aware of them, and to accept them as a reality. Dealing with the existence of pirates is working out better for people who are trying it, as opposed to doing everything possible to counteract their efforts.

Tabor Uncategorized Creative Commons, JoCo, piracy, pirate, Ubisoft

I want to take some time out of your busy gaming schedule to talk about a couple of things: Child’s Play and Heroes Without Borders.

“Tabor, what are these marvelous things?” This is what you would ask, if you called me Tabor. I would reply thus: they are organizations worthy of your charity, attention, and resources. Too often, gamers and nerds have bad reputations. Anti-social, misanthropic, disorganized, and all around dysfunctional people. These stereotypes have by and large created a need in us to defy them. Challenges and conceptions be damned, my friends are among the most generous and interesting people I know, and so I think you should take a look at them and consider helping out.

Let’s start with Child’s Play, because it pertains more to this blog than Heroes does. Child’s Play started in 2003, and is a charity devoted to helping children in hospitals worry less about their time there. In order to entertain kids and distract them from all the scary parts of a hospital visit (pain, fear, questions you can’t answer when you’re 10), Penny Arcade started raising money to donate to the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. It got a lot of press then and continues to do its mission, and do it well, consecutively raising more donations
each year the charity has been in existence. It’s even expanded into Egypt!

That’s neat, and kind of takes us close to the other charity: Heroes Without Borders.

So, my friend Jenn decided she would give several years of her life to other people, and joined the Peace Corps. When she was accepted, she was sent off to Rwanda, which is not actually close to Egypt at all. Her job there is teaching English, and as a secondary project, she focused on making English more accessible to the children of that nation. She needed a way to make reading fun for them, and more importantly, cheap for Rwandans, and came up with a brilliant solution: comic books.

Comic book stores often have lots of back stock of comics, you see, and are dying to get rid of them. They are still entertaining however, especially to people who have never read them, and they can be purchased in bulk rather easily. This, combined with the number of geeks she knows, means that comic books are actually quite the practical solution to her project.

So please, please please please, pretty please: Get in touch with either of these great organizations, and try to help out.

Tabor Uncategorized charity, Child's Play, comics, gaming, Heroes Without Borders

Let’s talk about responsibility.

There are very few things in life we have to do, and they mostly include automatic responses from our nervous system. That being said, there are things we should do, and we largely lump these things together in a category of things we call “being responsible”. These involve getting a job, paying your taxes, treating other humans with respect and courtesy, and generally being a productive member of society. Responsibility is sometimes given a bad break, because it’s tedious, and mostly doesn’t make us feel great. While the end result is sometimes a positive feeling, or even pride at having accomplished something important, the tasks we undertake while being responsible are arduous, time consuming, and most often, and this is the important part kids, not fun. Which often means things we consider to be fun should be devoid of responsibility.

This however, is not the case. It shouldn’t be. There are some great examples of a lot of fun to be had, particularly fun with other people, that need to be pursued responsibly. Driving is one. You don’t drive a car without a seat belt and without regard for your passengers’ safety and the other drivers on the road, even if you’re going really fast. Especially if you’re going really fast. Same thing with sex: you work out with your partner ahead of time what is acceptable behavior, and you stick to it. You don’t deviate outside of the guidelines you’ve set up without a lot of unacceptable risk. Amusement rides are full of safety precautions that you have to meet before you can enjoy responsibly. Speaking of enjoying responsibly, did anyone mention alcohol? In essence, responsibility when it comes to having fun is about meeting the demands of everyone, and creating the most happiness for those involved. It also means, perhaps explicitly, not raining down on someone else’s parade.

Thus, our responsibility while having fun is clear. There are plenty of good examples of what are bad ideas, and when not to do them. Gaming should be no different. Much like sex however, what is acceptable differs from person to person, and group to group. There are perhaps a few commonly accepted rules, which I believe can be addressed as common fare, but given the large scopes of kinds of gamers as I addressed in my last post, what is understood as necessary by one group may be totally superfluous for another. Let’s start with the basics then.

1. People should be ready to game. This means that, whoever you should be, you should be wherever you need to be, whenever you need to be there, with whatever you need to game. I wanted to fit however into this, but why ever for?

In essence, be punctual and prepared. This doesn’t mean that you have to be in someone’s face about them showing up 5 to 10 minutes late, but let’s not waste people’s time here. When you’re going to be 15, 20, 30 minutes late, that’s definitely when you should be telling people, at the very least. Have whatever you need with you too: dice, character sheets, books, laptop… whatever you need to be ready to throw down and kick some goblin’s ass. In line with being prepared with the mechanical pieces of the game, be prepared by knowing the mechanical essence of the game.

2.Know the system. This doesn’t necessarily mean game the system, or abuse it (and it’s important for DMs to know when the system is being abused), but know what you need to know for the game you’re in, and your character in particular. If you’re playing a combative character, be prepared to be able to throw down some dice and say what you hit with. If you’ve got to know how to cast a spell, or do some occult research, know your pools.

This is important for DMs and MMO gamers as well. DMs need to be even more well versed than players with the mechanics of the game, but by the same token, don’t abuse it and make the game unfair for your players. You have to be aware of what they’re capable of, as well as what the obstacles that lie in their way are. Tangentially, if you’re playing a MMO like WoW, know what your role is (Tank, Healer, Damage) and be prepared to know the mechanics of it. If you’re playing a Feral Druid for example, you should know that contemporary theory says that because you should be crit immune, you should stack Stamina and shouldn’t pick up a lick of defense gear.

Most importantly comes the synthesis of rules 1 and 2.

3.Don’t be a dick. I hate to steal Wheaton’s Law, but its elegance is amazing, and works into the discussion like this: Don’t do anything that ruins someone’s enjoyment of a game. Whether that’s being 45 minutes to an hour late and wasting people’s time and energy, or harping on someone’s choice of mechanics without a grounded reason. Most importantly, don’t be cruel about it. Someone can make a decision for a lot of reasons, and if you’re a dick about it, you’re only going to agitate and disturb what should be a fun activity.

What this all means is that you should, when you game, lay down certain ground rules about what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Players gonna miss a few games? That might be okay, or it might not fly. Prot Warrior’s thinking of respeccing to a slightly different build? Make sure that the raid leader and Warrior Class Lead (if such a person exists) know about it, and do what they need to do about it. Or just let him go wily-nilly. If people in your group are deviating from what others in the group think they should, it’s important to correct the small deviations before they grow into large ones, and make what was once something awesome into something resembling a burden. Playing well together’s important, but the fun’s the thing.

Tabor Uncategorized gamer, gamers, social contract